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Our
most sacred task is to fight
and fight we will
Speech
given by President Fidel Castro at the 13th
Conference of heads of state and government of the
Non-Aligned Movement in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on
February 25, 2003, "Year of the Glorious
Anniversary of Martí and Moncada."
(Translation
of the typescript version of the Council of State)
Most
excellent and esteemed friend Mahathir bin Mohamad,
Prime Minister of Malaysia;
Esteemed
Leaders and other delegation members;
Distinguished
guests:
 We
live in difficult times. In recent months we have
heard chilling words
and opinions more than once. In a speech given to
the West Point cadets on June 1, 2002, the president
of the United States declared: "Our security
will require transforming the military you will lead
— a military that must be ready to strike at a
moment’s notice in any dark corner of the
world."
That
same day he proclaimed the doctrine of a pre-emptive
and surprise war, something that nobody had ever
done in the political history of the world. Months
later, when referring to an unnecessary and almost
certain military action against Iraq, he affirmed
that if they were forced to fight then they would
fight with the full might of their armed forces.
That
was not stated by the government of a small and weak
state; it was the head of the richest and most
powerful military potency that has ever existed, in
possession of thousands of nuclear weapons, enough
to eliminate the people of the world various times
over and of other terrible military methods of
conventional and mass destruction.
Thos
is what we are: "Dark corners of the
world." That is how some see Third World
countries. Nobody has defined us better, nor done so
with more disdain.
As
former colonies of powers that divided and plundered
the world for centuries, today we constitute the
group of developing countries. Not one has full
independence, fair and equal treatment, or any
national security; not one is a member of the
Security Council, or has the right of veto or can
make a decision in the international financial
organizations; or retain its best talents, protect
itself from the flight of its capital, the
destruction of nature and environment caused by
economically developed countries’ spendthrift,
selfish and insatiable consumerism.
After
the last world butchery of the 1940’s, we were
promised a peaceful world, a reduced gap between
rich and poor and that the most developed would help
the least developed. It was all an enormous lie.
They imposed an unsustainable and unbearable world
order on us. The world is being led up a one-way
street. In just 150 years we have exhausted the
gasoline and oil that it took the planet 300 million
years to accumulate.
In
only 100 years, humanity has grown by approximately
1.5 billion people, and now stands at more than 6
billion inhabitants. It has to depend entirely on
energy sources that are still being researched and
developed. Poverty is increasing; old and new
diseases are threatening to wipe out entire nations;
soil is eroding and losing its fertility; the
climate is changing, the air, drinking water and the
seas are increasingly more contaminated.
If we
wrest authority from them, then the United Nations
is hindered and destroyed; aid for developing
countries is diminished; a $2.5 trillion USD debt is
demanded from the Third World, an amount absolutely
impossible to pay under current conditions; instead,
every year a trillion dollars is spent on
increasingly more sophisticated and lethal weapons.
And for what?
A
similar sum is used for advertising, sowing
consumerist desires impossible to satisfy in
millions and millions of people. Why and for what?
For
the first time, our species is running the real risk
of exterminating itself due to the madness of human
being themselves, victims of the same
"civilization." However, nobody will fight
for us who make up the vast majority. Only we
ourselves, with the support of millions of manual
workers and intellectuals from developed countries
who see the same catastrophe also affecting their
own peoples, sowing ideas, creating awareness,
mobilizing the public opinion of the world and the
U.S. people, will be able to save the species.
Nobody
needs anyone to tell them this. You know it only too
well. Our most sacred task is to fight and fight we
will!
Thank
you very much. (Lengthy applause).
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